I agree and disagree. If you want to follow that logic to its conclusion, everybody incurs costs from simply living. They choose to stay alive when suicide would simply free them from that burden.

Getting married, trying to improve oneself and not leading an itinerant life should be among the basic affordances society can guarantee to any person.

But I also will concede that I could have dropped out of school and lived a marginally better life in perpetuity until I was too old to continue to do heavy manual labor, then died in poverty.

This may not be a very popular position, but I disagree. I don't think society owes a single one of us anything. By what possible mechanism could they be said to incur that obligation anyway?

Now, you could argue that it's in the best interests of society-as-a-whole to provide those basic affordances, and I think certain results in game-theory would support that argument. But, to my way of thinking, there's still no reason to expect that "society" will guarantee anything for any one individual.

Maybe I'm just weird in this regard, but at nearly 40, I'm still unmarried... biggest reason? I grew up dirt poor, never felt like I could afford to start a family, and so never seriously pursued marriage... and I was obsessive about spending my time trying to ramp myself up the socio-economic ladder so that one day I could do things that mattered to me.

Now at this age, whether or not I ever do get married is a whole new question, for a variety of reasons. But the point is, I - for one - never had any expectation that society should provide for me to an adequate level that I could marry and skimp out on hard work.

All of that said, I received various random acts of charity throughout my younger years and, looking back on it all, I think I agree with the gist of TFA. Some of those random acts came at critical junctures and probably made a huge difference in me achieving what I have achieved, and me having committed suicide out of despair and depression 20+ years ago. Somebody gave me a car once, when mine had broken down. That enabled me to keep working and keep going to school, when the alternative would have been a complete shuddering stop to my progress.

But, as appreciated as that was, I appreciate it as a gift and see no reason to believe that anybody owed me that.

and me having committed suicide out of despair and depression 20+ years ago

Obviously should have a "not" insert in there. That or I'm posting from The Other Side... :-)

Consider this, because somebody gave you a car, or somebody gave me a $1000 check, it kept us on the upwardly moving socioeconomic ladder, ensuring that our taxes would become many times what they would have been had we stayed working hourly low waged jobs. Consider if those things had been paid for out of the tax base, thus putting a net positive back into the system.

For sake of comparison, a few friends of mine from where I grew up could't stick with the living hell of it all and didn't finish college (those that tried) for a wide variety of reasons (very few of those reasons were laziness), I paid around the same in taxes each year over the last five years than any of them made in salary during the same period. They're effectively making the same wage working today as they made in their early 20s, thus greatly lowering the tax base that they could have provided back into the system.

I can't say that a single pivotal act of state-sponsored charity would have turned their lives around and made them into vastly more productive citizens, but a few dollars here and a discount there could have been all it took. Who knows?

I think my point is that putting it in terms of who "owes" what, is probably not the right model. If the system isn't dysfunctional, you can trivially calculate what the average family of n requires, and make sure that the working adults in that family, working a full-time job, can earn enough to make that if working full-time is what they choose to do. A medical surprise or an auto repair or what have you shouldn't be something that derails their entire lives.

In my case, we were both living spartan, but comfortable, lives after college for around $40k per year combined (my first job after graduating). This is with a $900/mo apartment, one car payment, and no children. We ate out once or twice a week, and cooked in the rest. We had enough to clothe ourselves professionally and keep the lights on when we wanted them (not when we needed them), not eat absolute garbage three meals a day, and a few hours at the end of the day in "free-time". It works out to about $20/hr.

And turns out that the literature shows that in my area, a living wage for 2 adults is shown to be $19.25 [1]

Now there's an argument that there should be jobs that aren't living wage. Unskilled, extremely low end jobs, like fast food restaurants, they should pay enough to get people into the work force, but motivate them to move up and above that. It's an interesting bit of social engineering. But it has a problem that's not always overcome. That's because the minimum wage is like a speed limit. It's the default setting unless some other factor causes you to deviate from it like a lack of a hiring pool.

[1] - http://livingwage.mit.edu/

There a millions of students who live on campus at a cheap dorm room, have no car and get around on a budget where $900/m sounds like a life of luxury. If you decided to life in one of the very few inner-city metro areas where this is the norm nothing forced you to stay there. This is your lifestyle choice, not a poverty choice.

Include in it a location: It must be on or near an accredited university. Find housing that is magically "super cheap" or not a "luxury". Specify the costs. The housing must allow for no deposit (don't have the money) and nonexistent credit and allow for a married couple to stay there - dorms obviously won't work. Scans of local newspaper clippings from around the country will suffice since Apartments.com didn't exist back then.

A money ($) budget: Include all relevant transport costs, food, clothes, tuition, etc. Every single thing that costs money. These have to be real costs and not a WAG. If you pick a school, include tuition for two and all relevant fees exactly.

A time budget: Map out what my day-to-day life should have been according to your omniscience. Include every minute from wake-up to sleep. Include all travel times to and from work, home and school (I'll allow shopping time to be ignored). This probably implies that work, home and school are within walking distance, large isolated land grant universities won't work since available jobs centers are obviously too far.

A job or two: They must pay in isolation or in combination enough to cover the budget above, while allowing time to go to school, and they must be able to be done at different times. No time travel! Remember no college degree or other relevant qualifications. Jobs must be both available and plentiful. Just putting out "work at Costco" won't cut it, one actually has to get hired. I can tell you that my hit rate on job applications was less than 10% (I received 1 job based on over 100 applications).

Add in a $10,000 medical bill due in 45 days.

Describe a way to relocate two cars and an apartment full of stuff at zero cost to this magical valley of freedom (as in beer) and plenty.

Having said that, as a college student myself I have much fewer expenses than you. I live in a room about a hundred square feet in size, I walk or ride my bike anywhere I need to go, and I buy cheap food to prepare at home to save on food costs (I eat for under $5 a day). If a college textbook cost over $100, I simply don't buy it.

My non-tuition expenditures total under $700 a month including food and rent. For two of my three years in college, I did not have a job.

I happen to be very lucky in that I received excellent scholarships (well, that wasn't luck, but not everyone goes through high school thinking about college) and help from my family. If I had medical expenses, I would have had to take out loans to pay them. I think, if I were in a situation with no help from family, I would have still been able to attend college, but I would have graduated with over $50,000 in student loans. Your situation sounds very difficult, but you should seriously consider how many of your expenses were/are necessary.

But let's break your situation down with some questions.

I walk or ride my bike anywhere I need to go

Do you walk or bike on the freeway, or rather do you happen to live in an area with accessible walking and biking lanes? My area does not.

My non-tuition expenditures total under $700 a month including food and rent. For two of my three years in college, I did not have a job.

I checked, non-tuition rates at all of the schools in my state cost ~$800/mo for dorms. The dorms appear to be single occupancy with no affordance for a married couple, they do not allow year round occupancy, that means we'd be out $1600 a month for worse living conditions and still have to figure out what to do during summer break.

That being said, we did have an opportunity to rent a room in somebody's house and saved $100 a month (sublet rooms in my area run between $600-700/mo), the tradeoff was around 2 more hours a day in transport time by car + fuel costs. Doing the math and the money worked out about the same, but then we'd have to spend more time on the road instead of working or studying, and we'd have less privacy. We seriously considered the local homeless shelter, but they charge $20 a night per person, or $1200 a month for the both of us to be itinerant.

I did a breakdown somewhere else in this thread on what our costs were, it was only because of some grants and a few student loans that we could even pay for school at all.

One thing we didn't expect was that it would take two years for my wife to get her work permit. But 9/11 happened and fucked up immigration royally for a long while. It meant she couldn't work at all during that time. Once she started working things eased up quite a bit.

but you should seriously consider how many of your expenses were/are necessary.

So what was unnecessary?

At the time we had no car payments to make (the vehicles were owned outright), food was the cheapest garbage we could find in the "discontinued" bin at the dollar store (literally), clothes were what we started with (I didn't purchase a single article of clothing for 2 years), our #1 expense was housing, which short of couch hoping for years on end there simply wasn't anything we could do about. We had no furniture, at all. We didn't even have dishes for most of the first year! We both ate on around $5-7/day. There literally was no other expense that was possible to cut by our reckoning.

Nothing makes you think about what every...single...thing...costs than being poor. We even knew, down to the item, and sometimes to the ounce (since different packaging formats make direct comparisons hard), what we could buy for cheaper at the grocery store vs. the dollar store. We reused cooking oil in an old coffee can I took from my work when it was empty. A package of instant noodles and 20 ketchup packages made 4 servings. We used to go to our local grocery and argue with the manager when the sell-by date on canned goods got too close so we could get case of canned green beans for a dollar, then eat only green beans for a week. I can tell you that a package of one day expired hotdogs and 20 more ketchup packages can make an extravagant stir fry that lasts for four meals. Add half a chopped onion and it becomes 4 star. It's not possible to eat cheaper than that without going completely free.

We didn't have cable, a land-line or cell phones (I used AOL and other free internet CDs and a long phone wire to one of my neighbor's land-lines if I needed to get online at home, or just used the school's computer lab when it was open).

We actually sold one of our cars during the second February because there weren't enough work hours in the short month to both pay rent and buy groceries.

What where was the extravagant and unnecessary thing that we could have cut?

For two of my three years in college, I did not have a job.

And yet tuition, rent and food materialized?

With that said, I think you could have saved money on several things. $900/month is a lot for students. I decided to go to school in small city instead of a large one because I knew it would be cheaper to live there. By sharing rooms with 4 other students, I only paid between $325/month to 375/month. This was including, heat, water, power etc. Did you have cable TV or internet? Cut it. You spend minimum $40 on it. Did you ever eat out? Never do it. You can save $1000/month there. You mentioned that you drove. Sell the car. Car costs much more money that you think.

$16000 is not a lot, but that's actually enough for many students. I made less than that during 4 month summer internships, and I paid my tuition and living expenses without any problem.

I'll break this down one by one.

$900/month is a lot for students. - I agree, had I been single I would have split a room like that with somebody else for $450. However, I wasn't and my "roommate" wasn't allowed to work the first two years we were married.

I decided to go to school in small city instead of a large one because I knew it would be cheaper to live there. - You don't always get a choice where to go to school, sometimes you have to go where both of you have been accepted. I've broken how tuition worked for us down elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753975

By sharing rooms with 4 other students, I only paid between $325/month to 375/month. This was including, heat, water, power etc. In theory, it doesn't sound like where you lived was all that much less expensive than where I lived per person.

Did you have cable TV or internet? Cut it. You spend minimum $40 on it. - Agreed, we had no cable, no internet, no phones of any kind for the first two years.

Did you ever eat out? Never do it. You can save $1000/month there. - Agreed, when we ate out it was unavoidable, and it was taco bell, the cheapest thing on the menu. Elsewhere in this thread I've given some sample "recipes" of what we ended up eating when times were a rougher than normal. I still don't really like ketchup to this day all that much.

You mentioned that you drove. - 100% paid for, unavoidable, public transport wasn't good, was expensive, and biking/walking would have eaten up hours per day that could have been used for working/studying.

Sell the car. Car costs much more money that you think. - We sold one of them the second February to make rent and buy groceries. When my wife got her work permit, we had to limit where she could work to sync with where I worked or we'd spend too much time driving around and eating up fuel.

We would have sold furniture too, but we didn't have any :( Other than a used mattress somebody donated to us, we had a couple frying pans, some old clothes and an old computer. When we got married we had about $150 in the bank.

Moving is expensive, and would have required both him and his wife to transfer schools. That requires long term planning and isn't a feasible option for an immediate crisis.

After she got her permit, she started working and things improved quite a bit.